Mental Toughness | ATP

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Whether or not you agree, it’d be tough to argue Serena Williams hasn’t had an impact on women’s tennis and what it means to be an athlete, period. Her 27-year professional career is one of the longest in her sport’s history.

And the mental toughness she’s consistently displayed throughout the decades is certainly noteworthy, says Eric A. Zillmer, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist and the Carl R. Pacifico Professor of Neuropsychology and an athletic director emeritus at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

“Some people may be ‘broken’ by a crisis, while others emerge from a stressful experience sometimes even stronger than before,” he says. An abundance of research backs this up.

While mental toughness is talked about often in sports, it translates to everyday life as well. “Mental toughness and resilience can be learned,” Zillmer says. They’re skills and qualities that are accessible to everyone.

Ultimately, it’s about treating yourself well and cultivating a sense of purpose and belonging in the world.

Losing is a key part of competitive tennis. Here are three examples of how to better deal with it….

1. Find Joy in a Highly Competitive Sport — and Show It

It’s no secret that tennis is an especially high-pressure sport. Players compete alone, travel often, and are subject to constant scrutiny by the press and the sport itself.

Williams’s appreciation for all aspects of her sport, not just winning, is key to her success. “Sports by definition is competitive, hard, stressful, and deals with a constantly changing environment,” Zillmer says. Learning to enjoy all the ups, downs, and pressures of the job, at least to some degree, is the very definition of resilience and mental toughness.

2. Find Motivation in Setbacks

Serena Williams wasn’t always great. “When I was little, I was not very good at tennis. I was so sad when I didn’t get all the early opportunities that Venus got, but that helped me. It made me work harder, turning me into a savage fighter.”

She’s fought her way out of many scoreboard holes to win matches (including, famously, the 2012 U.S. Open championship match), and has been dubbed the “queen of comebacks”.

That kind of determination in the face of adversity is part of what defines mental toughness. Rivalry is a great way for people to learn resilience starting at a young age. Learning to cope with failure early on, and even be motivated by it, is another thing that sets certain individuals apart.

3. Lose With Grace

Losing is part of ALL sports. And Williams has lost many tennis matches throughout her career. She does it with grace — even when she lost the (presumed) final match of her career.

“Dealing with winning is easy, but losing is tough,” Zillmer says. If and when a loser does muster up that good sportsmanship, s)he actually has a lot more to gain by doing it graciously than sorely.

“In sports psychology, losing graciously can also help someone maintain belief in themselves, even after (or because of) a setback.” It can help keep your confidence up, which makes you more likely to succeed in the future.

Extract: Christine Byrne September 8, 2022

 

 

How Ajla Tomljanovic Faced Down Serena Williams and 24,000 Others

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When Ajla Tomljanovic was a little girl, she asked her father about a prized photograph of him holding a big trophy on his head. Ratko Tomljanovic was a great professional handball player, winning two European Championships for Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and was the captain of the Croatian national team; before that, he was a member of the Yugoslavian team.

His daughter wanted to know where that shiny trophy was, because she had never seen it in their home. Ratko Tomljanovic explained that it had been a team award, and that he did not get to keep it. Unimpressed, Ajla told him that she would not play handball.

“I want the trophy just for myself,” she said.

So Ajla Tomljanovic chose tennis, and she is still striving for that big trophy, for a professional championship. She has shown the talent for it, though her nerves have betrayed her at times — what she calls “the bad Ajla.”

Credit…Corey Sipkin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But on Friday night, Tomljanovic, who is ranked 46th, demonstrated to herself and the world that she had the mettle and the shotmaking ability to win a trophy of her own. If she wins four more matches in the coming week, it will be one of the most coveted in sports.

That night, Tomljanovic beat the six-time U.S. Open champion Serena Williams, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-1, in front of a raucous, partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York to advance to the fourth round of the U.S. Open for the first time.

“I feel like I belong here now,” she said.

That was not necessarily what she was thinking in the moments before she took the court.

Tomljanovic was nervous, and for good reason. Williams was her idol, and Tomljanovic had never played her before. She had never played in Ashe. In fact, she had never even practiced on that court. She had asked tournament organizers if they could find a time for her to hit some balls in the largest tennis stadium in the world at least once, but nothing was available.

Then there was the matter of her playing the role of villain, of facing down nearly 24,000 fans, virtually all of them screaming for Williams to win, and millions more watching on television. It would make anyone a tad nervous.

Tomljanovic confided the anxiety to her father, who was happy that his daughter admitted to the nerves. Better than hiding them, he thought. Ratko Tomljanovic also knew about playing in hostile environments, especially in Europe, where handball is intensely popular and the stakes are high. He tried to calm Ajla by evoking the almost comical role of the hard-bitten veteran of scrappy handball matches — the kind of yarn he had spun to her and his other daughter, Hana, many times before.

“Don’t tell me you are afraid of the crowd,” he told Ajla. “I played in some terrible places with 5,000 people booing and spitting, and one time the crowd came on the floor and there was a big fight. Don’t tell me it’s hard because some guy in the 35th row is yelling at you.”

It was not exactly Mickey yelling at Rocky. It was a speech designed to lighten the mood, and it worked. Ajla laughed. “She doesn’t care about what I did, at all,” Ratko said, chuckling.

But then he brought out another motivational tool. He mentioned one of his favorite movies, “For Love of the Game,” in which a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, played by Kevin Costner, reflects on his life and career in the midst of a perfect game.

“But she didn’t know the movie, so I had to explain it to her,” he said. “I told her, ‘You have to be Kevin Costner today.’”

In the film, he told her, the pitcher focuses explicitly on the catcher’s glove and ignores everything else in the stadium. Ajla understood, and she followed the advice with her own unique resolve.

She blocked out all the noise, the roars for Williams, the indecorous cheers when Tomljanovic missed a serve, all the celebrities in the stands, the video tributes to Williams and her own childhood adulation for Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam champion standing across the net and playing as well as she had in years. But Tomljanovic was better.

“From the first moment I walked on court, I didn’t really look around much,” she said. “I was completely in my own little bubble.”

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David Waldstein, NY Times